Mel was always like that – there was no connection between his body and his mind. When he was thinking he had to stand still, otherwise he couldn’t reach a decent conclusion, and if he was performing any movement he wasn’t able to think. Because of this I used to call him ‘donkey’ – partly in jest and partly seriously. It was mean and despicable of me, I know, but if I resorted to such behaviour it was only because I had to put up with him from morning to evening, and explain everything to him, as if he were a little child. He never took offence, but would suddenly turn serious, as if he were thinking about the mysterious reason why I called him donkey. Once he took me aback, when, quite out of the blue, in a situation that had nothing to do with the fact that I always called him ‘donkey’, he said to me:
‘I know why you call me that! It’s because you think my ears are too long!’
Then he worked himself into a frenzy defending the size of his ears.
I said nothing in reply; I just looked at him.
He was hopeless, and he made things worse by smoking and drinking like an old alcoholic.
Anyway, that February morning Mel and I were walking along the snow-covered streets. When there’s not much humidity the snow is very dry and makes a funny noise: when you walk on it, it sounds as if you’re walking on crackers.
It was a sunny morning and the clear sky promised a fine day, but there was a light and constant wind which might upset expectations.
We decided to go through the Centre district and stop for a snack in a little place – a mixture between a bar and a restaurant – run by Aunt Katya, the mother of a good friend of ours who had died the previous summer, drowned in the river.
We often went to visit her, and so that she didn’t feel lonely we’d tell her how things were going in our lives. She was very attached to us, partly because we’d been with her son, Vitalich, on the day he’d died, and that had united us all.
Vitalich’s body hadn’t been found immediately. The search had been difficult because two days earlier a big dam had burst a hundred kilometres upstream.
That’s another story, but it’s one that deserves to be told.
It was summer, and very hot. The dam burst at night, and I remember waking up because I heard a terrible noise, like an approaching blizzard.
We came out of our houses and realized that the noise was coming from the river. We rushed to see and found gigantic waves of white water, like breakers on the ocean, coming downriver with increasing force, beating against the bank and sweeping away vessels and boats of all descriptions.
Some people had torches and shone them on the river. They picked out many objects swirling around in the water: cows, boats, tree trunks, iron drums, rags and pieces of cloth which looked like sheets. Here and there, in that chaos of water, there were pieces of furniture. Screams could be heard.
Our district, fortunately, was on the high bank, and the wall of water hadn’t been too devastating: everything was flooded there too, the houses and cellars were full of water, but there was no serious damage.
Next day the river was a complete mess, and we decided to take upon ourselves the task of cleaning it up, of removing everything we could, using our own strength. There were several motorboats still available which had been spared by the waves, because when the dam had burst they had been on the bank.
My own boats had escaped as well. I had two: one large and heavy, which I used for transporting big loads (we used to spend the whole summer plundering apple orchards and food stores in Moldovan territory…), and one small and narrow, which I used for fishing at night. It was swift and manoeuvrable; I used it to ‘guide the net’ – which means to keep moving against the current, trying to close off with the fishing net the central part of the river, where most of the fish came down.
The smaller boat had escaped completely because it was at my house, where I had to do a bit of work on it. The other had escaped because it was in a boathouse on the bank: some time ago I’d asked the keeper to restore it for me with a special varnish. The boathouse keeper’s name was Ignat; he was a good man, and a poor one. He’d been promising to paint that boat for me for a month, but had never found the time – he always had something more urgent to do or was getting drunk out of his mind.
We had eight boats in all, and we split up into two teams: two boats to a team, four boys to a boat.
The work was organized in such a way as to keep the river constantly ‘blocked’ by two boats, which fished out the rubbish. One team, equipped with long poles with big iron hooks on the ends, retrieved branches and tree trunks, bodies of animals and various large objects. All these things were then tied to the hull with ropes, and when there was no room for any more stuff the crew returned to the bank, where other boys were waiting, who jumped into the water and unloaded it all. On the bank they had created a huge bonfire. We threw the junk on the embers: within half an hour even the most sodden trunks dried out and, doused with some petrol, eventually caught fire.
By noon the fire had grown enormous; you couldn’t go near it or you’d have been scorched to death. With a large number of us working all together we threw onto the flames the body of a cow, as well as various carcases of sheep, dogs, chickens and geese.
Then, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, we fished out the first human body.
It was a middle-aged man, fully clothed, with his skull cracked open. Presumably he had fallen in the river and been swept away and had hit his head against a rock or a tree trunk.
Another team was equipped with little nets, and fished out the small objects that floated on the surface: jars of preserves, two-litre bottles, fresh fruit and vegetables of various kinds, apples with peaches, water-melons with potatoes, and then children’s toys, plastic buckets and spades, photographs, lots of paper, newspapers and documents, all mixed together in one huge ratatouille.
Then there were dozens and dozens of bottles of soft drinks, both fizzy and still, because a few kilometres upstream there was a bottling factory. The water had gone through there too, sweeping away the entire contents of the warehouse.
We decided to retrieve all the bottles, put them to one side and distribute them later among the people who had helped to clean up the river. But by the end of the first hour of work we had already fished out so many that we didn’t know where to put them. So two of our friends carted them away from the bank in big wheelbarrows, to free up the space for others, and dumped the bottles in the front yards of the people who lived nearby. They filled the entire first street of the district – about fifty houses – with bottles, and when they came up again with their barrows full, the people shouted:
‘No, there’s no more room here, boys, go on to the next house!’
We worked all day without stopping for a moment, and didn’t let up till the evening, when it was so dark we couldn’t see a thing.
We had thoroughly cluttered up the bank, it was almost impossible to walk along it: wherever you put your foot, you trod on something.
We stayed and slept by the fire.
Before we went to sleep we had a meal; some people had brought things from home, and there was plenty to drink – I think I drank more fizzy drinks that evening than I have in the rest of my life.